Case Files: Red Robin
by Cr1mson5
Summary: What happened to the third Robin during his days on the road? Tim Drake may never say, but the case files don't lie.
1. Pack and Go

**I own nothing.**

**Rated T for my standard stuff**

**This is a series of drabbles and stuff that detail what I imagine must've happened while Tim traveled the world during the early days of the ****Red Robin**** series. Enjoy!**

Tim didn't tell anybody when he left.

A few years earlier, Bruce had arranged to have the stables out back of Wayne Manor converted into an apartment for Tim. Ever since, the place had been in a perpetual state of disarray. Tim hardly lived there anymore, spending more time crashing in random bedrooms at the manor after patrol and constructing his own, private safe houses using his own budget.

When it came time to pack up and go, he found himself less prepared than he expected to be. He had always known, someplace in the back of his mind, that he couldn't remain as Robin forever. But at that moment, the moment it had been torn from him, it had been the only thing that had ever made him feel…worth something. And now, without it, he was nothing, nobody. So, when it came time to pack up and go, all he really did was grab a suitcase and a backpack and stuff them full of whatever they'd carry. Between the two bags, he had about three changes of clothes, two utility belts, his iPod, and a handheld device that was linked into the Batcave database. Then he grabbed his jacket and headed off.

But he straightened up the apartment before he left. Alfred didn't deserve to have to clean that nightmare.

* * *

><p>Perhaps the east end of Gotham wasn't the greatest place to start over, but it wasn't like Tim had anywhere else to go at the present moment. There was still a little bit of prep work that had to be done, before he could actually <em>move<em> to another town. And besides, the safe house was the closest thing to home he'd had then, and sleeping on East End streets was unsafe at best.

Tim stayed there for a total of one week before he started off. In that amount of days, less of his time was spent on prep work as what he spent on nostalgia.

He'd grown up in Gotham City, was born and raised and lived almost his whole life there. He knew the place like the back of his hand, yet it always seemed to have some surprises for him…a backstreet he didn't recognize…a shortcut he never knew existed…and it really was a nice place to live, no different from any other large city in America.

In the week before he left it all behind, Tim would walk the streets, just to hear the sound of his own feet smacking against the pavement. Anybody else would've told him he was nuts. The East End was not the place for a casual stroll, much like the South End. But everybody he passed, all the seedy-looking characters that seemed to flood the sidewalks, mostly left him alone. It was obvious that he was still pretty much a kid, and besides, everybody was too busy worrying about their own problems to try to cause some for somebody else. Thanks to their asshole Congressmen, those problems were magnified by at least ten times since a year ago.

If anybody had asked him why he bothered going out in such a sad excuse for the outskirts of a city, he would've said that it was just so that he could remind himself of what he worked for. The world had taken the biggest strike in history at these poor people, had beaten them to a pulp and robbed them of everything but life—so far, anyway. Somebody's failings, somebody's apathy, had cost them all they held dear. And he wasn't about to be the person that perpetuated that.

He needed to remind himself of what could happen to a world without heroes. Because if he forgot, then what was the purpose of even having a mission at all?


	2. Carjackers

The red sports coupe hardly ever saw use these days. It mostly just sat in the safe house, collecting dust until it was actually direly needed for something. Tonight, though, Tim was grateful for the relative comfort of the Redbird. Its worn old leather seats with indents in them from all the times Tim had ever driven or ridden in the thing and its gleaming paint job were a familiar piece of the past. And, at that moment, for Tim, the Redbird was comfort. He just wanted something to remind him of how things used to be in old days, before there was a Damian to steal Robin away from him, before Jason had ever tried to kill him, before Dick had decided Tim wasn't good enough anymore…back when he was wanted, needed. He felt thirteen all over again, breathing in the almost sweaty scent of the Redbird's interior, the feeble attempts of the French vanilla air freshener to fix the problem. But this time, there was no brand-new Robin suit not quite broken in yet. There were no painfully support-less split-toed boots pressing down on pedals so hard they'd make rocks hurt. There was no twenty-pound utility belt practically cutting off the circulation in his waist, no heavy Kevlar cape and armored gorget pulling on his shoulders and restricting his air supply. As odd as it sounded, he missed the cumbersome first draft of the much more protective, much less traditional Robin suit.

Now, there was just a thin cotton T-shirt, a faded old sweatshirt, a pair of jeans—

"Get out of the car."

And, of course, a gun at his temple, but that had been more of an afterthought.

Tim turned his head a fraction of an inch, saying, "You don't want to do this." How long had he gone without talking? His voice sounded so gruff, so husky…

"Yeah, actually, I do. Get out of the car." It sounded like a kid, maybe no older than him. The little inflections in the voice said how desperate and lost and sad this boy was. Finally, there was somebody Tim could relate to. Still, though, he was in no mood to be a victim—again.

The force he put behind the driver's side door opening was something like every shred of his upper body strength, maybe even his full weight. It wasn't like he weighed a lot; last he'd checked he was 173 and gaining a lot of nonexistent inches. But when the door hit the kid, it knocked him away long enough for Tim to extract himself from the car and get into a ready stance.

He was right. The kid didn't look much older than him, probably only had six months on Tim, if even that. He lay on his back on the grimy street, struggling to stand up again. One hand was pressed to his gut, trying to protect the area from another hit. Tim took advantage of the stillness of the moment to kick the gun underneath the Redbird.

In all honesty, he hadn't ventured into the East End since his last patrol as Robin, which was…God only knew how long ago now. His lack of talent for keeping up with the date preceded his forgetfulness when it came to the working of East Enders and their less-than-moral extracurricular activities. Take carjacking, for example. It wasn't until the talker's buddy was wrapping his arms around Tim's neck that he remembered, _Oh, right. They work in groups, dumbass._

Dick used to always make fun of him because of how skinny and bony he was. But that was his greatest advantage, really, because his left elbow in particular made a very good precision-strike weapon when directed at an opponent's gut. He whirled as the other kid doubled over and propelled his fist into the kid's face, as hard as possible.

Okay, so _maybe_ the broken teeth made out to be a little too much.

He slammed the talker against the car, growling out, "You got much better things to do with your life than spending it in jail, sport."

The kid's eyes bulged, and he stammered out, "I-I'm sorry, it's just—if I don't bring back another car to replace the one I wrecked, I—the Dragons, they'll—"

"You mean the _Golden_ Dragons? You work for that scum?"

The kid panted out a breath or sigh or something of the sort. "I don't have a choice. I've got a family I'm looking after. Look, man, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—I was just—I'm trying to help my family."

Tim stared him down for a long time before he let him go. He couldn't help but think of Jason, driven to theft for survival on the streets of their hometown. And he wondered…if his own life had gone any differently, if it had been him born into a place as desolate as this, would he be in that kid's shoes? Would he find himself at the mercy of gangs like the notorious Golden Dragons?

When he came back…when he found himself, there was gonna be trouble in the East End.


	3. Up and Over

Tim's cross-country journey started from New York City.

The first day that he awoke in the safe house, which was situated someplace in the heart of the Bronx, he breathed in the somewhat stale air and made the decision that he wouldn't call this place "Dick's old city". He wouldn't allow his older brother the satisfaction. After all, it wasn't like a city could really be given as a gift, and Dick didn't own New York. And if Gotham wasn't home anymore, he'd find somewhere else that was.

It was just that the Bronx didn't really feel much like home. It might've just been his childhood preferences; if his own security wasn't constantly on the line, he was pretty much lost. He needed to plan, and planning mostly involved making sure he was safe. There was just something about New York—the safe house, the precautions—that just made him uncomfortable.

Of course, it could've easily been the sheer number of people. Tim was never prepared for exactly how much larger than his home city New York was. He couldn't walk down the streets without being bumped into, pushed, shoved, stepped on, etc. After about forty-five minutes of walking, he gave up and went back to the hideout. No reason to be miserable.

* * *

><p>There were nights when Tim slept. He'd forgotten what it felt like, to be…idle. He would start himself awake every hour on the hour, thinking he had missed some important call, some sort of trouble, and remembering where he was a split second after his panic. But still, in between those times of partial lucidity, he would sleep. It felt nice, like chocolate after a long period of intense training. It was a luxury he hadn't indulged in for quite some time, and he was <em>so <em>tired.

But some nights, Tim wouldn't sleep. He would just lie on his back in the little cot in the corner and stare up at nothing. The darkness was almost a warm welcome, a soft embrace. In the shadows, he could run a million different scenarios through his mind that nobody else would want to consider. He thought about things the others would always tell him he was crazy for thinking about, things like his probability of dying before age twenty-five and the likelihood that he'd be caught in the next multicar pile-up on the interstate. Sometimes, he thought about all the times he really should've died and didn't, and all the times he should've acted but didn't.

Mostly, though, he just heard words. The words he'd never said to everybody he'd ever lost: "I love you" or "I can't believe I let that argument go so far" or "I wish I could've done a little more to save you so that maybe I wouldn't be so screwed up now."

Tim had issues. He knew that. And what haunted him the most on nights like these wasn't his failures, his shortcomings. It wasn't his losses, the tragedies he'd suffered.

It was the fact that he never felt like he was doing this for the right reasons, if any reasons at all. What was therapy or closure to heroism?


End file.
